The age of digital transformation has arrived and brought a wealth of tools to help manufacturers store information about their customers and prospects. But if your company is like most, data silos and outdated contacts could be costing you tremendous amounts of money — 12% of your revenue, to be exact.
Manufacturing companies face a unique set of challenges when it comes to their data:
- Decades-worth of internal and customer information
- Legacy technology systems
- Smaller investments in marketing and sales, compared to other industries
These challenges can lead to siloed teams, disparate systems, and untrustworthy data. If your sales team doesn’t have important contact information for current customers, or your marketing team is failing to capture important activities by prospects, your bottom line will take a hit.
Use a CDP to Keep Customer Data Current and Accessible
A common cause of data inaccuracies is that contact information and other customer details are spread across too many places — meeting invites, individual contact lists, email automation tools, and more — and the data is rarely, if ever, consolidated to create a full picture of your customers and their activities.
When systems don’t communicate with each other, you also wind up with multiple records for customers — and some of those records have different data based on who created them, when they were created, and when they were last updated. Duplication, inaccuracy, and asynchronous information is a constant problem.
To rectify this, your marketing and sales teams should consolidate information about your customers and prospects into a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
A CDP stores critical data about your audience such as:
- The content they view
- The web pages they visit
- Calls and engagement your sellers have with them
- Events they attend
Storing this information in a central location makes it easier for your teams to:
- Quickly find the data they need
- Avoid overlap and duplication
- Provide consistent communication aligned along the same updated information
A platform that has its own embedded CDP can even enhance the data you collect by unlocking historical information about your audience that you haven’t captured — taking your data from a hindrance to a competitive advantage.
Improve Accuracy and Productivity by Eliminating Tedious Data Entry
Human error can lead to incorrect and stale data. People get busy and forget to update a record; they enter info into the wrong field; a typo turns a valuable new contact into an undeliverable email address.
Taking away the need for your teams to manually update data ensures information is accurate and can free up their time to sell rather than dance between systems to copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste.
Track Accounts to Keep Contacts Up-to-Date
Eliminating manual data entry is one huge benefit of a CDP. The other is the ability to monitor your customer accounts and automatically look for personnel changes or data inconsistencies.
When someone leaves their role and the company hires a new person to fill their position, you want to know so you can contact the right person. If a person is associated with multiple email addresses, you want to know which one is used the most. The right platform can enhance your data integrity by regularly checking data accuracy, filling gaps, and even acquiring information that you weren’t previously aware of.
Enriching Data
With 6sense, you can set up automated rules that seek out new information and enrich contact data. Here’s one example:
You’ve made good inroads with a potential buyer. You’ve discussed their needs, understand the products that would benefit them the most, and have established a trusting relationship.
However, modern buying teams are complex. In all likelihood there will be multiple stakeholders that make the final purchase decision.
Rather than waste time scouring LinkedIn, 6sense can help you find those missing members.
By creating a rule within the platform, you can automatically search for and acquire contact information for contacts with certain job titles. With that process in place, you’ll have a more complete picture of the buying team at your target accounts and can engage in more proactive outreach to increase your chances of winning the deal.
The Benefits of Accurate and Reliable Data
When you’ve taken the time to implement the right systems and processes to improve your data, your revenue teams will start to see several benefits.
With reliable data your marketing team can:
- Create automated campaigns that speak directly to your audience based on their unique information
- Personalize engagements using various data fields
- Accurately report on the performance of different campaigns and engagements, to determine their effectiveness in driving buyers through their journeys
Your sales team can:
- Engage with customers and prospects on a deeper level with access to more insights on the topics they care about
- Understand the full buyer journey and all of the ways they have already interacted with your business so you can deliver a better experience
- Unlock a clearer picture of the buying team
